mikelat

I'm surprised this isn't already a perk at working at some of these companies, but then again I'm assuming they'd be subjected to a whole swarm of regulations regarding living conditions.

I'm surprised the technology isn't "fast enough" yet. Most top end phones are quad core, output 1080p, have 2-4gb ram, etc. Specs like that easily meet the listed minimum requirements of windows... odd.

They're now basically giving google and apple time to easily catch up to what could of been a killer feature that sells windows phones.

Just imagine all the tax dollars wasted ruining this guy's business.

Google has bothered me for a while with their lack of advertising ethics. I recently cleared and disabled my youtube history and they're still doing targeted advertising for videos I had searched for and watched weeks earlier. Clearly my history was not truly removed, which was my assumption anyway but the fact they so blatantly show it off is rather disrespectful from a user standpoint.

Honestly I think the best bet moving forward for sites is to have a small minimalistic form of advertising (the way HN does advertisement with job postings for example, even while its just for Ycombinators benefit, is a good example of non-intrusive advertising done correctly), and probably a small subscription fee ($1.99? $4.99? pay what you want? hard to set a price) for users to hide advertising and support the site/service they enjoy using.

Better yet, the browsers should easily be able to predict the dominant color of the page by parsing the CSS file and most of the DOM, and pick a complimentary scrollbar contrast accordingly. Maybe do that and allow override to light/dark.

I was honestly hoping they'd give up on the whole touchscreen + mouse/keyboard interface integration, this announcement pretty much confirms they're in it for the long haul. Both inputs are vastly different so their UIs are full of compromises and over-sized controls.

This doesn't come off as much as a surprise, because there are better alternatives because google code stagnated and wasn't a priority. Google code still has very old looking interface (especially when contrasted to their active products like G+ and gmail), google code only declined because google didn't want to work on it.

This doesn't do google any favours, as with every product they launch I'll be asking myself if it's worth investing time or money into just for it to stagnate.

Microsoft still lives and breathes with their old proprietary software licensing model. There would have to be some sort of major gain for them to port the browser outside of their ecosystem.

I can see them doing it with IE mobile though as they aren't the most popular player in the mobile market and they need to get people hooked.

This has pretty large implications for countries (namely china) with still a sizable IE6 userbase. IE6 doesn't support TLS by default, making https effectively completely unsupported for that browser.

I like this more for the fact that I get a better idea of what these companies are willing to say publicly about utilizing the data they have on you. TOSes are ultimately meaningless, but comparing sites with things like "your data remains yours" and "your data becomes ours" speaks a lot towards company policy.

> My dream startup would be a Reddit-esque link aggregator, which favors the actual quality of submissions, instead of submissions which are lowest-common-denominator which are optimized for the hive mind.

On that note there's definitely a potential market opening, one sites like hackernews cater to.

I understand the need to fight obvious spam and shadowbanning being a good tool for that, but shadowbanning regular users that are trying to contribute actual content is very disrespectful to the users.

I think you forget how bad it was with 2006 desktop. So many CSS hacks. We take our div layouts for granted but if you dared venture away from the standard table layouts of the early 2000s you were in for a lot of debugging for browser quirks.

Nowadays at least I code responsive layouts to target screen resolution, and its gotten leagues better. Sure there's a few quirks in separate browsers and things aren't necessarily ideal, but it sure beats the days of "I wish I could use xxxx CSS property but I can't because only 2% of my users would be able to render it".

I mentioned in another comment that when I think of IE6, I think of the hours spent fiddling with the HTML/CSS that works in FF/Chrome but not in IE6 because of browser bugs that were never fixed and standards not followed. It's why I think it's a bad comparison.

I guess it's a matter of perspective. My experience with IE6 was mostly being a teenage hobbyist webmaster way back when FF vs IE6 was in full spin - I remember being proud of coding standards compliant websites that worked perfectly in FF just to have it completely break in IE6, then having to spend hours fiddling with the HTML/CSS to get it to the point where it worked in IE6. Frustrating times.

That's why I don't really see the comparison. When I think of IE6 I think of the hours I wasted trying to make it work right. I'm not currently coding IE mobile websites, then checking it on a webkit browser, having everything be broken and then spending hours trying to fix it.